Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication systems, and more particularly, to discontinuous reception management.
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). The UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks.
As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, research and development continue to advance the UMTS technologies not only to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband access, but to advance and enhance the user experience with mobile communications.
For example, a user equipment (UE) may operate in different radio resource control (RRC) states, including a URA_PCH state and a CELL_FACH state. In the URA_PCH state, the decoding of paging information may involve first monitoring a paging indicator channel (PICH) and then decoding a secondary common control physical channel (SCCPCH) to check a paging channel (PCH) or a paging control channel (PCCH) for possible paging to the UE. The PICH can be decoded and processed offline without having to enable the SCCPCH and related decoding blocks until the PICH processing is done, resulting in very efficient power management from the UE, which extends battery life.
On the other hand, for discontinuous reception (DRX) operation in the CELL_FACH state, the UE may have to concurrently monitor multiple high speed (HS) channels (e.g., high speed-shared control channel (HS-SCCH), high speed-physical downlink shared channel (HS-PDSCH)) because of the overlapping nature of the channels' frame structures. Therefore, unlike the processing of PICH in URA_PCH state, there is no available offline processing for the HS channels. Because the HS channels are awake during each receive burst (Rx burst) period of a DRX cycle wakeup time, the battery of the UE is likely to be drained much more rapidly in DRX operation of CELL_FACH state than during the decoding of paging information in URA PCH state. Therefore, there is a desire for providing mechanisms that enable power savings when the UE is in DRX operation in the CELL_FACH state.